Driving along Montana Street between the airport and Chelmont, one must be careful of cars careening through traffic, carrying crazed Paseños who have just returned home from faraway ports, frantic for their fix of rolled beef tacos smothered in salsa and cheese, floating in a boat of sauce, flying under the banner of Chico’s.

There are other El Paso thoroughfares equally as dangerous – on the south end of Dyer down near Bliss, across from the Evergreen Cemetery on Alameda, along the high vista of McRae, and out near the end of the world on Montwood – for each are sites of deceptively innocent-looking little taquerias named Chico’s that dispense the stuff that drives men mad.

“You just get a craving for them,” says Central resident Moses Ayoub. “Something reminds you of them, and then you just have to get some.”

It’s hard for some to imagine, but once there was a world in which there was no Chico’s. It was in the black-and-white universe of 1953 when Joe Mora, who ran a vending business and who managed and trained boxers out of a Quonset hut on the northeast edge of Washington Park, got the idea of selling tacos to the Fourth of July celebrants who would come to lay on the grass and watch the fireworks. He opened a walk-up window and sold tacos made from the same exact recipe that enthusiasts relish today. Nobody seems to know how he imagined such tacos – they weren’t like tacos anyone else sold – and nobody knows who Chico was, but it was enough of a success that Mora put in a couple of tables, a counter with six stools and a jukebox, and he opened full-time. He paid some of his off-duty pugilists to man the hut, and El Paso and Chico’s have been wed ever since.

The lunacy for these specialty tacos wasn’t immediate. Indeed, their popularity only grew slowly, but they were popular enough from the onset to sustain the growing Mora household. Within a decade, there were five kids. Three of them were sons, and as the taco business expanded, all three brothers joined in with their dad. First they added on to the Washington Park shop, and then, in 1967, they bought the old Clock Drive-In on Montana, but they turned that land over and bought the property across the street. Next they opened on Dyer to service our boys in uniform, and then, as the city grew eastward, came the McRae location. Finally, in 2003, fifty years after the elder Mora sold his very first taco, his sons opened even further east, on Montwood past George Dieter, the shop they now consider to be their showcase.

“We’re just tickled to have this new store,” says Bernie Mora, one of the three brothers now running the Chico’s chain. “The other stores are basically boxes, but this was planned with foresight, and it has a flow in mind. The clientele like it and they deserve it. They’ve paid their dues; they’ve been coming here for years and years. When we first built this place, they were like, ‘Hey, it’s too nice,’ but it’s working out well.”

Working out well? On a good day, the Montwood store alone goes through 700 pounds of beef and sells more than 14,000 tacos. It only takes a tad of math to determine that with five locations open seven days a week, El Pasoans are scarfing down millions of Chico’s little tacos a year.

“We also sell burritos and hotdogs and hamburgers, but it’s the tacos that just sell like crazy,” Mora says. “What surprises people is that our menu hasn’t changed a bit since we opened over 50 years ago. Basically we just try to be consistent and stick with my dad’s philosophy – keep it simple. We offer good food for a low price. Our tortillas are delivered warm every day from the tortilla factory, and all the sauce and chile is made from scratch on-premise. Everything’s always fresh, and our customers appreciate that. When you think about it, it’s amazing what Chico’s has become - the notoriety of it or whatever. It’s the generations, is what it is. People have been brought up with it and they’ve introduced their kids to it. It’s become an El Paso thing, part of El Paso’s pride. People consider it something of their own. It’s a tradition.”

Savoring his second order at the Montwood location one morning, Justin Rogers explained that you just don’t get as much flavor anywhere else. “Chico’s tastes different,” he said, “and it’s the sauce.”

Walking out of the Montana shop with ten orders of tacos and one lonely order of fries to take home to his family one evening, Efren Baeza agreed about the tradition, and he also agreed about the sauce. “I’ve been coming here since I was in high school in the early seventies,” he said. “I went to Burges and we used to come here for lunch, and now my family and I eat here at least three times a week. The taste of Chico’s is a unique thing, and it’s the sauce – that’s the secret to it, it’s the sauce. Two of these orders are for my daughter, Adela, in Las Vegas. She moved there about a month ago and she’s dying for some Chico’s, so we’re going to mail them to her, but I’m not sure how we’re going to do it.”

According to Mora, people are constantly trying to convince them to open branches in other towns, especially fugitives angling to get their fix. “We’ve entertained a few offers, but none of them have felt just right,” he said. “I have two brothers – Richard and William – and the three of us take care of everything. We are completely hands on. We have five stores, and those already keep us busy. We have 175 employees and we have to split up writing the pay-checks because you get writer’s cramps signing your name so many times. We have a dedicated following and we’re not going to mess that up by expanding out of town. We’re not a fast food franchise.”

But what about the Westside? Yeah, why isn’t there a Chico’s on the Westside?

Westsiders Joan and Kenneth Korn don’t care. “I’d say we’ve been coming here about 30 years, at least, and I don’t know that we would eat Chico’s more often if it were in our neighborhood,” says Joan, and Ken agrees.

“We don’t mind coming to this side of town to get some Chico’s” he says. “It’s part of the mystique. We don’t come to the Eastside to go to any other restaurants, but we do for Chico’s. It’s colorful, it’s the experience. My favorite food in the world is Mexican food, but I don’t really think of Chico’s as Mexican. At all the other Mexican restaurants, you got the beans and the rice and the tostadas, but here you just got the tacos. It’s in a category by itself. When we were younger, we used to come here because it was open late and it was one of the few places to go after the bars closed or after a concert, but now we just come here because we like it.”

“You know, the Westside just doesn’t have the business,” Joan considers. “Lots of restaurants that have done well on the Eastside haven’t done well when they opened on the Westside. The Westside is the kiss of death to businesses.”

Mora disagrees. “The demand is there to open on the Westside,” he says. “People point out how many places haven’t made it on the Westside because a restaurant on the westside is a different animal, but that’s not the issue. We could make it on the Westside, but to expand over there would be too much work. My brothers and I are hands on, and we all live on the Eastside of town. We like to be able to take time off, and we don’t want to have to commute all the way across town two or three times a day. Besides, we’re a destination type place. When people think about Chico’s, they come to us. When people talk about eating Chico’s, they don’t say ‘Hey, let’s go get some tacos,’ they say, ‘Hey, let’s go get some Chico’s.’”

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea. What are we doing here? Hey, what do you say we go to the Eastside and get ourselves some Chico’s?

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Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the July 2006 issue of El Paso Magazine. The video was shot in March 2008 and over 11,000 users have viewed the video to date.